It’s … The Encyclopedia of American loons! Our new and exciting series presenting a representative sample of American loons from A-Z.

Tuesday, August 22, 2017

#1887: Peter Leithart

Peter Leithart is a theocrat and president of Theopolis Institute for Biblical, Liturgical, & Cultural
Studies in Birmingham, Alabama. He is also the author of numerous books, some
coauthored with George Grant or Gary DeMar,
including a series of children’s bedtime stories that we haven’t read but
nevertheless recommend that parents who wish to raise wholesome, good and wise kids avoid with a passion. Taking a cue from
Islamic fundamentalists – reconstructionists like Leithart tend to harbor a certain envy for radical jihadists – Leithart has presented “American Christians with a call to
martyrdom,” in particular as a response to the legality of abortion and gay
marriage: “Throughout Scripture,”
Leithart says (in his book Between Babel and Beast),
“the only power that can overcome the
seemingly invincible omnipotence of a Babel or a Beast is the power of
martyrdom, the power of the witness to King Jesus to the point of loss and
death.” At least Leithart, as opposed to some dominionist, recognizes that
the type of hatred and bigotry he would prefer be the law is neither popular
nor embedded in the Constitution:
“To be faithful, Christian witness must
be witness against America.” How Leithart’s claims are relevantly different
from a Taliban video is less clear, insofar as Leithart is explicitly and repeatedly calling for Christians to seek martyrdom in combat against America and its
values.

It is probably not even worth mentioning that Leithart is a
young-earth creationism; indeed, he doesn’t even seem to bother with the
science: any semblance of criticism of a literary reading of the Bible from
science or history is for Leithart entirely beside the point.

Diagnosis: He does his best to make himself ideologically
indistinguishable from the most delusionally rabid Taliban jihadists – and he
seems to have a number of followers (David Lane,
for instance). Dangerous.